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Oct 5th, 2012 at 13:16:24 - Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (PS2) |
I think I'm done with Nocturne. It lasted me like two months! That's pretty damn good. Excellent game, excellent excellent game. I read back over my previous logs and think I said most everything to say. Just...it continues on. I just have many more examples of all the cool things.
I never mentioned the art design I don't think. The art in SMT games in general is real unique, but Nocturne especially. My favorites are these characters called 'manikins.' They are people born from mud and basically look like they're dressed in rags/prison stripes/insane asylum jackets. They are all kind of blank-looking and they have convulsions. I loved looking at them. And they are so sad in the story! They're just kind of weak and dumb and quirky and outcast, but oh so likeable, so I felt sorry for them because the other characters generally hate on them. Lots of the bosses look really badass too. Go look up some of the artwork. And even though it's almost 10 years old on a last-gen system, I swear it looks better than half the stuff out today.
The level design I also came to appreciate very much. Most of the dungeons were long, but not too long. Usually they were broken up into several floors or sections, which helped. As I got into the game, dungeons started becoming more puzzle-like. Lots of the puzzle elements were more like tricks. Sometimes I walked through a door, and it would only be a one-way door, so I couldn't go back. I'd have to take a long way around. My favorite dungeon in recent memory was the one with the painting illusions. It was this mansion place with tons of hallways going every which way. But they weren't as real as they seemed. Many times, what appeared to be a hallway was a painting of a hallway. The hallway would show some signs of distortion, like the depth would be off if you stared at it, or doors would be painted on the wall and have no protruding frames. If you "fell for it" a guardian literally called you a dumbass and kicked you somewhere else on the floor. I really liked paying attention to the details of the hallways and doors and lights and things to try and catch illusions! Sometimes the hallway *looked* like an illusion but if you got close enough, you saw that you could actually go through and that it was built that way, not painted. Really neat stuff. I'll also say how well done the sound design is. There's no voiceovers at all. Just sounds and music, and it conveys all the right moods at the right times, and is not overbearing. Wonderfully done.
The party customization kept getting better and better. Today I came across this boss who just annihilated me the first few times. He was tough because he was almost 100% resistant to all damage but electricity. The problem was I didn't have any electricity-using demons besides my healer, who I needed to, well, heal. Solution? Go to the Cathedral of Shadows, fuse two demons to get one with a sweet electricity spell, and then buy another electricity demon that I'd previously registered. BAM, 28,000 macca and 15 minutes later, I had a party with 3 electricity-users and I went back and owned the boss. I did find a problem though, and that's that I was able to build such awesome demons through fusion, that eventually I couldn't keep all the useful spells because you can only transfer up to 4. For example, my healer is currently level 57. I have no idea when I got it, at least 10 levels prior I think. Maybe even like 43 or 44. So it's long since quit learning new skills. But I haven't fused it with anything else because it is so ridiculously useful. It has Mana Refill, which I transferred to it from some other demon even farther back (actually I think I wrote about transferring Mana Refill to a demon in a log over a month ago - I've kept that same skill the whole time!) It has a heavy heal all skill, a medium force attack all, a medium electricity attack all, revive, a high odds expel attack, and some other stuff. Like, I don't want to lose any of that, and it won't all transfer. Actually, I think Mana Refill is quite a unique skill because that one really rarely will show up on a potential child's skill list. So...my problem is that some of my demons are too good...Ha. But it is getting a little tough because now she's so far behind my main character and the other demons in level. 57 to main character's 70 (demons level up about half as fast as the main character, so you have to fuse them and recruit more to keep them most useful with high enough HP and stuff).
Speaking of leveling, I'm stuck. I'm in the last dungeon and fighting a boss who is too strong. I know what I need to do. Kind of like the boss where I had to have characters using electricity, this one is even more specific. I need the War Cry skill which drastically reduces enemies' attack and magic power. But I don't have it, and I kind of don't feel like fusing a demon who does because the bosses are starting to get like this, really hard where you MUST have x, y, z skill in order to stand a chance. This current boss for example, he casts a spell called Apocalypse, which is unblockable/undodgeable and hits my characters for 400 HP or so. My party has like 406, 460, 600, and 650 or something, so that is A LOT of HP. Basically if they aren't at full they die. So of course the boss gets 2 attacks every turn. He casts Apocalypse twice! Bam, all dead. I'd need so much more HP to survive, which is not feasible. So what I need is a demon with War Cry. But it's got to have other useful skills too. I fear that fusing is about to become grindy. I read up on a walkthrough a little about the later bosses, and yeah, I think I will just call it here and finish up watching on YouTube. It's funny, over on Howlongtobeat, I was wondering why the average time for Nocturne was like 70 hours. I'm at like 45. Yeah, I think I found out why tonight. I supposed you eventually have to spend time really really really building specific demons for these final bosses.
Also those long play times probably have some of the extra stuff added in, like the Amala Network, which is a 5-floor dungeon that you periodically unlock sections of by defeating the Candelabra fiends. I killed a couple fiends very early on, and I think I went inside the Amala network twice. I don't know what the point of it is, whether it's to get treasure, or just to find more Magatami or what. I just ignored it because I didn't know what it was for and I had enough dungeons and hard enemies to fight anyway.
So looks like the end. The point of the game's story is that a new world is going to be created after the apocalypse that happened in the beginning. Throughout the game, you learn about the characters and gods who are vying for control to realize their version of things. Will it be a Darwinian world where only the strong survive? Will it be a highly individualistic world where no one has to do anything they don't want? Will it be a world where everyone is equal? Or one where there is no emotion? There are like 5 or so of them I think, and throughout the game you make dialogue choices that affect which ending you get, and maybe you choose one or the other for good at some point. Anyway, we'll see what I choose!
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Oct 3rd, 2012 at 19:45:48 - 100 Floors (Other) |
This game has a neat concept. You are going up a 100-floor building and must figure out how to open the elevator doors at each floor (why you even get off the elevator and don't go straight to the 100th floor, I don't know). Each floor is a puzzle, and the game utilizes all the phone's touch and motion sensor functions. One time I needed to tilt to make a puck slide across the floor onto a button. One time I needed to shake to knock down a ladder. Sometimes you have to swipe to slide things around, or tap to pick things up and move them. Sometimes you encounter usable objects, like a hammer or a screwdriver, which you need to bash things open or unscrew a metal plate.
Many of the puzzles, especially the early ones, I could figure out without getting frustrated. The solutions made sense and a lot of them were clever. Then the difficulty ramped up a bit and the solutions became more like (after I looked them up) "...Really?!" I recall one where I had to bash a plant pot open with the hammer. I bashed something open before that and when I hit it with the hammer, it began to crack. I had tried hitting the pot with the hammer, but there were no cracks. So why would I keep bashing it? This is what the levels are slowly turning into: click on everything with every object in every permutation until something happens. I completed several levels without knowing what I did. Just, "Oh! I beat it?" I'm currently stuck, completely stuck, on a level where I need to cover the elevator doors with this hole-y metal sheet and then press some buttons in a specific order. I've tried it every which way, looked up how to do it, and I follow the walkthrough instructions to the T and the door won't open! So I don't know if it's a glitch or what is going on, but it's been a couple days and I don't think I'm going anywhere. I'm getting off this elevator around floor 30!
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Sep 30th, 2012 at 09:51:43 - L.A. Noire (PC) |
After quitting Aion today, I moved to LA Noire, which I've had installed for a couple weeks. LA Noire is a very neat game so far, about 2.5 hours in. You play as a detective named Cole in the LAPD and you go around solving crimes. I dare say I've never played anything quite like it. I find even the similarities to GTA are not that deep. It's definitely its own game. For example, you have the same type of open world city, but it's more linear here. There's much less reason to go cruising. Part of that is the cars obviously aren't made for stunts and mayhem like in GTA. While I enjoy the craziness of GTA's streets, I really like driving in LA Noire because it feels tight, and I have to follow traffic rules. Other drivers are less crazy than GTA drivers, so it's not that difficult. But even though I like the driving, LA Noire has this awesome option to let your partner drive for you. I use that because it gets me to my case quickly and in a thoughtful twist, the game won't skip over conversations with your partner if you insta-travel. It'll show him driving long enough to get through the conversation so you don't miss any story. It's so convenient.
The gun fights are not as fun as GTA, though I've only done one. My mouse might be set too sensitive. Also the cover system is a little wonky. But again that's only from a couple times using it. Fist-fighting I like though. But anyway on the whole, the game is broken up into cases. As you solve them, you gain rank, "intuition points" which you can spend to uncover clues at a crime scene (which I did once and it was very helpful) or eliminate incorrect interrogation options (which I should probably use because I've gotten several bits wrong). The cases so far are unrelated to one another. I thought before playing that there would be some overarching characters or story or something, but so far I can't tell if that's the case. There is Cole's backstory from his days in the Marines in WW2, and that's pretty interesting. You reveal more of it as you solve cases. I wonder what it has to do with his life as a detective?
The facial motion capture is blowing my mind. It's extremely detailed. I can see doubt, I can see confidence, I can see avoidance...sometimes interrogation suspects (everyone is a suspect!) hold your eyes, sometimes their eyes falter. Sometimes they blink too much. Sometimes they bite their lips, or stick their chin out or give a fake smile, and on and on. I did not expect to be this impressed with it.
The problem is that they are still "human" faces that the player has to interpret. Although people generally interpret facial expressions mostly the same as anyone else, I'm not sure the designers quite took into account (how would they?) that deciding whether the character is lying or not is way way more than just facial features. Obviously they know it's evidence too, and they design for that. If you call out a suspect for lying, you have to back up your accusation with proof from evidence you've gathered. But even then it's far from easy to agree between the characters' facial expressions, the evidence you've collected, what the evidence MEANS, the players' own interpretation of events, what the interrogation suspects are telling you, and then the gaps in the evidence that aren't filled in.
What I mean is that there's so much interpretation that needs to be done on the player's part that the "hard" evidence and the taken-for-granted expressions simply don't account for. Thus it is very easy to be wrong. I totally understand it's got to be hard as hell to justify in designing the interrogations sometimes why this or that answer is right or wrong. You can always imagine some player going "But wait..." and providing a reasonable answer from their perspective. Maybe this game about truth and lies is a critique of our judicial system. Who knows. This has happened a couple times to me where I felt like I had a valid reason, and evidence to back it up, to accuse a suspect, or where I felt I should believe the suspect, but the game sees it differently. It's kind of irritating.
Another time the problem was in the interrogation design. This is the only real issue I've seen so far. You have to talk to an Argentinian diplomat whose car was stolen. Before that, you go talk to the car salesman. The car salesman claims he never spoke to the diplomat before. But during the crime scene investigation, I found the diplomat's planner with the car salesman's phone number. I pressed the salesman and he confessed that in fact he and the diplomat had met personally at a bar to cut a deal for the car. So when I went to interrogate the diplomat after this, he denied any involvement in purchasing the car. I accused him of lying! I had just spoken to the salesman who told me that he met the diplomat and sold him the car. But that piece of information wasn't available as evidence! Several times earlier in the game, I had used statements from witnesses as evidence. But for some reason that option wasn't available to me here. So I thought okay, I still had hard evidence, the salesman's name and number in the diplomat's planner. So I used that, and it failed! Why? I don't understand how I was wrong here.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to checking out some more cases. I don't think this is a game I can sit and play for a long time at a stretch. Maybe a couple cases a day.
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Sep 30th, 2012 at 04:45:50 - Aion (PC) |
Tried Aion over the last couple days. P bought a hard copy like 2 years ago, and neither of us ever even installed it. But since it went free-to-play, I figured it was about time. It took me about a month to actually play it from the time I downloaded it because of various login issues and all kinds of stuff that I really can't believe I bothered with the tens of help tickets to fix. Only to play for 2 days!
So the big draw of Aion, when it came out at least, was that you got wings to fly. Sounds awesome. I want to fly around. This was supposed to radically change the way people PvP and give players unlimited freedom and blah blah blah. You get the wings at level 10, so let's talk about what you have to do before then. You slog through an overly long starting zone that has excessive amounts of sluggish running. I can only assume that this is to make flying feel liberating. That's a major problem with the game. It is sluggish, slow. My character felt drunk. There's no oomph in the fighting and the response time for the hotkeys just isn't as quick as I'm used to. I create a mage, and whenever I wanted to do a normal attack, she had to go through this annoying animation where she pulls out her tome, flips the pages, and then casts some magic bolt. Like, just do it faster!
Consequently, enemies take a while to kill. I did make an assassin character and melee is faster than spell casting. With the mage, I was out of mana constantly. There didn't seem to be many ways of speeding up mana regen short of buying potions. Health was okay. You start the game with like 30 bandages. Why wasn't there the same for mana? It's like non-mana classes get a definite boost in speed since they don't have to worry about mana. This is not the case in all MMOs at all. Most have systems in place so that you don't go out of mana every other fight. Otherwise, the mage is very basic and boring. Fireball, ice bolt that slows, earth spell DoT, and a root. Just like every other game. And nothing new once I hit level 10 and chose a 'specialty' class! Learning new skills are few and far between. I think I had a total of 5 abilities by level 10. And it was looking like I'd get one new one or be able to upgrade one every 3 or so levels. Way to spaced out to keep it interesting.
On the other hand, Aion has these things called chains, kind of like semiautomatic macros. So I had a fireball spell and a blaze spell. After using fireball, blaze lights up and you have used a 'chain.' Then blaze goes on a 30 second cooldown. Kind of neat, and they looked to get more complicated and let you have a couple options later on. Speaking of options, there don't seem to be more than a couple. You specialize your character at level 10. By 'a couple chain options later on' I meant like 3 of the chains had two branches. There are no talent points. You unlock some thing called a stigma panel at level 20 where you can like customize some skills or something, and you get 5 slots by the time you're 60. And that's...it? See what I mean about slow? This game is slow and grindy as hell.
The game is also really linear for an MMO, at least to start out. The starter zone was basically a few areas of interest/quest hubs off of a road. You just walk down the road, stop at various points to collect quests, and just continue back and forth down the road. And there is way too much back and forth, so much running, even with a flight path there. But I just really can't believe that skills and things are so few. And that after choosing my specialization, I didn't get even 1 skill for it.
So how about the flight? It is an unbelievable letdown. First of all, the game didn't even tell me I could fly when I hit level 10! There was no tutorial or anything until I found the button because I was like "man, can't you fly at 10? I hope it's not 20. I'll just mouse around the UI...Oh hey look!" Why don't they make a bigger deal out of it? It's supposed to be the draw, the cool hook. But flying is only slightly faster than walking, like any first mount in any MMO. So I thought, well at least I can fly over mountains and things. Nope! Magical barriers prevent you from going all over the damn place. So many barriers. So much for freedom! And there's a timer on it. You can't just go fly. You have to stop and land and let it recharge every minute.
And just a couple other comments and criticisms..the rest of the tutorials worked well in the beginning, the on-demand ones that pop up as you need them. Quest are dull, repetitive and uninspiring. Kill x of these, fetch x of those, and give this thing to that person. Every single quest, for real. And it was rather annoying that I typically only had to kill/fetch 3. It's not even worth the trip to the quest area to kill 3 monsters! Run for a minute, take 30 seconds to kill 3 monsters, run for a minute back. It's fair to say most of my time spent here was running. So not only was the game sluggish, but dull as well. Though it does look nice. The character models in particular are cool. You can make some hilarious characters at creation. Small body, giant head, super skinny legs, fat arms, all kinds of funny stuff. Oh, there is a nice help system with information links on important names and places, but oddly there are few tooltips. I have no idea what my character's stats are for. What is 'knowledge' and how is it different from 'willpower?' No idea. I'd have to go look it up outside the game. They do have this neat tutorial/reward thingy for new players called the Atreian Atlas. It tracks your first character through the main story (in a browser outside the game) and gives you periodic goals to meet and rewards for doing them. I found it quite neat in the newbie zone. But I can tell it would be something I'd soon forget about since the next item on there is level 16. If getting to level 10 took like 5 or 6 hours, 16 is probably another 10 hours at least. And that thing at level 16 is just a solo dungeon. Solo dungeon! What's the point of a dungeon if not for playing with others? I can go solo everything outside the dungeon. Oh, better loot? Man who cares! It's not like the game is hard yet. Story? Make the rest of the quest stories better! And finally, Aion has nice movable windows. I like that. More and more games are letting players move the windows around. I recall Rift's was particularly liberating. Aion also has some neat stuff with the map. There are 4 different levels of the map. You can actually draw on the map. There is a drawing tool in-game. You can also write memos in-game. And you can share locations with other people, which is awesome. I kept observing people doing this in chat constantly, and I'd click and some map would pop up on my screen of another area. Cool way of sharing spatial information.
Sooo, to sum, I'm not a fan. It has a couple neat features, but I was bored out of my mind playing it. Seems very generic and grindy. No thanks.
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